The Dancing Druids

runners cantered off. Gascoigne and O’Hara had no scruples about finishing or not finishing the run, although it was an inter-club match, for it was considered likely that the home team would get the first half-dozen places at least, unless there were unforeseen accidents, for the visitors were a very much younger team consisting for the most part of youngsters of seventeen. In fact, it was as much to put this club on its feet as from any desire to score at their expense, that the good-natured secretary of the home team had put his men into the field.

Gascoigne was a more sensitive and a more imaginative man than his cousin. He disliked intensely the thought that O’Hara, far from being one of the hunters, might as easily be tracked down and murdered; therefore he trotted alongside another member of the team, an old Cambridge Blue who had been a good man in his day, and apprised him, as they cantered over the common which formed the first part of their route, of the course which events had taken.

‘Good Lord!’ said the Cambridge man. ‘What fun!’

Gascoigne then bespoke his assistance, and, soon satisfied that he had a staunch ally, he lengthened his stride and went to the head of the field, and (not too obviously, he hoped) began to run at a pace which was foolishly fast if he had hoped to finish the course. O’Hara tagged on to Firman, and the Cambridge man stuck to O’Hara as he had promised. Firman was not much of a runner, and the trio was slow.

The course was a circular one, with the starting-point on the northern circumference, so that at no time during the run were the competitors at more than about four miles from their base. The route avoided roads as far as possible, and permission had been obtained for the teams to include two private parks in the course, one south and one east of the starting-point. Here and there along the course were friends of the clubs who possessed cars and motor cycles, and acted as guides and checkers-in.

Between the two private estates lay a fairly considerable wood. A long hill led up to it, and on the home side there was a stretch of sand and heather known locally as Punch Dripham. It was uneven, and contained deep hollows not dangerous unless one wandered into them in the dark, but large enough, for the most part, to hide, say, a patrol of Boy Scouts or four or five men, for the lips of these places were overhung with soft soil in which great roots of heather writhed, while in the holes themselves there were wild, labyrinthine bushes of ancient gorse and occasional clumps of bracken.

The rendezvous for Gascoigne and O’Hara was to be in the depths of the wood before they reached Punch Dripham, and Gascoigne, arriving, according to arrangement, well ahead of the rest of the field, plunged in amongst the undergrowth until he was about twenty yards north of the path, and thankfully— for the pace he had set himself had been a hot one—he lay down on the bank of a small brook which flowed through the wood and waited for the signal from his cousin. The last of the checkers-in had greeted him some mile and a quarter further back along the course.

The Cambridge man, Gascoigne hoped, had been able to stick to O’Hara. He glanced at the wristwatch he was wearing, and by which he had been timing himself, and decided that he could take ten minutes’ rest at least before the others arrived.

It was very quiet in the wood. It was so far from any road along which vehicles could pass that its selection as the place in which Firman should be interviewed had seemed obvious. Gascoigne dipped his hand in the brook. It was clear, and rippled pleasantly over sand. Time passed. He looked at his watch and wondered idly why the checker-in had mentioned that people were shooting on the estate. He had not heard a sound of it himself. At the end of a quarter of an hour he felt irritable; at the end of twenty minutes he was anxious.

The trouble was that he did not know what to do. If he left the wood and so missed the others, that would be unfair to them and a breaking of the agreement which had been made. On the other hand, there was always the chance that one of them had met with a mishap. O’Hara had turned his ankle on the previous run; such accidents were always liable to happen. It might even be something more serious ; one of the three spiked on a fence, through trying to vault it and slipping at the take-off, perhaps; or somebody helpless with a broken leg or badly-torn muscles.

Twenty-five minutes; and Gascoigne, in an agony of indecision—a state of mind to which, with his supreme, unegotistical self-confidence, he was entirely unaccustomed— began to walk through the woods to find out whether, by any possible chance, the others had arrived without his knowledge and were in another part of the wood.

The trees gave place, at one point, to a little clearing. He found Firman’s body half into a large clump of very tall, pink willow-herb. He would never have seen it but for the cloud of flies that rose with guilty haste at his approach. He would, even then, have walked on, but he could not help seeing the area of smashed, long stems and the welter of crushed, pink blossoms. The next sight, that of the gaping mouth and one wide-open, horrified, dead, glazed eye, filled him with nightmare horror. There was a hole through Firman’s skull where his other eye had been, and a blackening of powder and a scorching of skin round the wound. Gascoigne had never felt so ill in his life. The fine afternoon surged blackly about him. He turned and staggered away, and then fell down in a near-faint merely from shock.

He had managed to struggle to his feet, and, pulling himself together, was wondering—his heart hammering and his mouth as dry as sand—what he had better do, when a youthful voice from a bush beside him observed on a confident note:

‘You’re dead! It’s a plame we’re gaying.’

Gascoigne jumped a couple of yards. Then out of the bush crawled a boy in the uniform of a Wolf Cub. He was an engaging-looking child with scratched knees, freckles, a green cap, a grey jersey and a broad smile.

‘I bagged him, Chinstrap,’ he observed.

‘Yes, Mr. Handley,’ responded a second voice, as its owner followed the freckled Mr. Handley on to the path. ‘I don’t mind if you did, sir.’

‘Well, it’s a fair cop, Governor Handley,’ observed Gascoigne, collecting his wits. ‘How do, Colonel?’

‘Happy to meet you, sir,’ responded the Colonel. ‘Cow dew, did you say, sir? I’ll try anything.’

‘Well, look here,’ said Gascoigne earnestly, ‘as it happens, I’m rather in a spot.’

‘Lather in a pot? I don’t think I should like it,’ giggled the Colonel, entranced by his own wit. ‘Did you hear that, Mr. Handley? He said “rather in a spot,” and I said “lather in a pot.” Not bad!’

‘Oh, dry up, Chinstrap, and don’t be funny,’ said Mr. Handley, giving the Colonel a dig in the spine which made him wince. ‘Can’t you see he’s serious? Are you training for anything?’ he asked, looking with great interest at Gascoigne’s running-vest with the Club badge on the left breast.

‘No. Just a cross-country run,’ said Gascoigne. ‘But I’m a—a sort of a special constable in my spare time— help the police a bit, you know—and I’m on the track of a criminal and I want to get in touch with them. Where’s the nearest police station? Do you know?’

‘We wouldn’t be Wolf Cubs long if we didn’t,’ said Mr. Handley, giving a realistic howl. ‘Look here, we shall probably go a good deal faster than you, even if you are a runner. We have to keep up a wolf’s pace, you know, which most grown-up people can’t manage. It takes a bit of doing, I can tell you! So perhaps we had better forge ahead and you can follow at your own pace. We’ll leave a spoor. Where do you want the police to meet you? Wouldn’t you like us to help you track the criminal? We’re very good at tracking, you know. I’m the best tracker, and Chinstrap comes-second, and then— ’

‘You silly ass!’ shrieked the Colonel. ‘Of course you’re not the best! Why, only last week— ’

‘Oh, dry up! We’re on a job,’ said Mr. Handley hastily.

‘You’re jolly good chaps,’ said Gascoigne, gratefully. He had been wondering how he could manage to get rid of the two children. It was quite impossible that they could play in the wood for long without discovering the body. ‘All right. You push along, then, but mind how you go. I shouldn’t rush. I wouldn’t have anyone of the Itma team hurt for any money.’

‘Dirt and honey, sir?’ said the irrepressible Chinstrap, smacking himself on the head, or, rather on the cap, with delight, and then ecstatically punching his friend. ‘I don’t think me sister would like it.’

The two little boys then neighed like horses, and began to canter away.

‘What, Crafty Clara?’ came over the air on the boyish, treble notes of Mr. Handley. ‘The woman who— ’ Gascoigne missed the rest of it, and settled down grimly to await the arrival of the others, not certain how long it would be before help came, and speculating upon the length of time the body had been in the